In today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Attorney General Mike Mukasey refused to answer whether Bush had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Under questioning from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Mukasey said he “can’t contemplate” a situation where President Bush would assert “Article II authority to do something that the law forbids.”

Specter shot back, “Well, he did just that in violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act…didn’t he?” Mukasey continued to hedge:

MUKASEY:I think we are now in a situation where [that issue] had been brought within statutes, and that’s the procedure going forward

SPECTER: That’s not the point. The point is that he acted in violation of statutes, didn’t he?

MUKASEY: I don’t know whether he acted in violation of statutes.

Watch it:

Specter explained that the question was a no brainer, as FISA “expressly mandates you have to go to a court to get an order for wiretapping. There’s really no dispute about that.”

The New York Times famously revealed in 2005 that Bush has allowed spying “without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.”

As the contentious FISA legislation moves forward in Congress, Mukasey’s flacking for the administration’s illegal surveillance is deeply unsettling.

Transcript: Read more

President Bush has long touted clean coal technology as a potential solution to global warming. In 2006, he insisted that the United States is “spending quite a bit of money here at the federal level to come up with clean-coal technologies.” During Monday’s State of the Union address, Bush said, “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

Yet just 24 hours after his SOTU declaration, Bush’s Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman indicated the White House was pulling the plug on the ambitious FutureGen project, a clean coal plant that was touted as “the cleanest fossil fuel fired power plant in the world.”

In a meeting with lawmakers from Illinois — where FutureGen was set to be installed — Bodman “all but drove a stake in” the $1.5 billion project:

[Rep. Timothy] Johnson [R-IL] said Bodman told the group that he planned to disband FutureGen and go “in another direction.” At one point, Johnson and Bodman snapped at each other. At another, U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat, told Bodman that “the first action taken by the president after the State of the Union was a series of broken promises.”

“In 25 years on Capitol Hill, I have never witnessed such a cruel deception,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said, hinting at the administration’s political considerations for the project’s demise. “When the city of Mattoon, Illinois, was chosen over possible locations in Texas, the secretary of energy set out to kill FutureGen.”

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Robert Sussman notes that companies and governments around the world have committed to supporting FutureGen. “It would be a blow to future international public-private partnerships if the Bush administration were to allow these commitments to languish,” said Sussman.

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that the Illinois lawmakers intend to appeal the decision to President Bush, and that Durbin “might block nominations to fill two key vacancies at the Energy Department.”

UPDATE II: DeSmogBlog and Gristmill have more.

A forthcoming book by NYT reporter Philip Shenon — “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation” — asserts that former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow interfered with the 9/11 report.

According to the book, Zelikow had failed to inform the commission at the time he was hired that he was instrumental in helping Condoleezza Rice set up Bush’s National Security Council in 2001. Some panel staffers believe Zelikow stopped them from submitting a report depicting Rice’s performance prior to 9/11 as “amount[ing] to incompetence.”

Relying on the accounts of Max Holland, an author and blogger who has obtained a copy of the forthcoming book, ABC reports that Zelikow was holding private discussions with White House political adviser Karl Rove during the course of the 9/11 investigation:

In his book, Shenon also says that while working for the panel, Zelikow appears to have had private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, despite a ban on such communication, according to Holland. Shenon reports that Zelikow later ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls, although the commission’s general counsel overruled him, Holland wrote.

Zelikow flatly denied discussing the commission’s work with Rove. “I never discussed the 9/11 Commission with him, not at all. Period.”

After completing his work with the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow was hired by Condoleezza Rice as Counselor at the State Department. He resigned from that position in late 2006. In 1995, Rice and Zelikow co-authored a book entitled, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed.”

Despite the economy drawing “heavy coverage and widespread interest” last week, Americans and the news media see President Bush as a non-story, behind Britney Spears. The Pew Research Center reports:

When asked to name the person they had heard the most about in the news lately, 24% of the public named Obama and 23% named Clinton. In a week when he proposed a major economic stimulus plan, just 5% of Americans named George Bush as the person they had heard the most about. About twice as many (11%) named Hollywood actor Heath Ledger, who died last week.

Wise words from Rich Lowry:

The one blatantly obvious lesson from his candidacy that is going oddly unremarked is: Don’t run as a pro-choicer for the Republican presidential nomination.

The strange thing is that people keep re-learning this lesson — Pete Wilson, Steve Forbes, now Rudy Giuliani. It’s genuinely bizarre. You don’t see any Democrats thinking they can win a Democratic presidential nomination as a pro-lifer.

Iraqis who have died “as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups.” The survey also found that “20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.”

Ezra Klein takes a look at Hillary Clinton’s complete and utter assent to the “Florida doesn’t count” principle until her recent ex post facto efforts at a backtrack. Money quote from HRC’s campaign manager commenting at the time on the DNC’s decision to strip Florida of its delegates:

We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role.

Trying to wriggle out of that sort of thing at this point is just lame. The rules are arbitrary and unfair to tons of people in tons of states across this great nation of ours, but Clinton agreed to play by them and that’s all anyone’s asking her to do now.